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Saturday, January 26, 2013

Sichuan 四川. Leaving home.

No matter how big the enthusiasm within
is and no matter how many times one has gone through this process,
leaving the place where you settled down for a fair amount of time,
is never easy. The comfort of a place called home, the friendships
that one has sowed at work, in the neighbourhood, in life in general,
the habits and customs; every single one of those little every day
life things, they are all hard to leave behind. It's this subtle mix
of emotions between the huge excitement of the adventure to come and
the sadness that comes with a new detachment from the people and
things that were part of one's life.

The night before the day I took off I
was incredibly nervous and it was almost impossible to sleep. Caught
between the practical decisions that needed to be taken, like packing
in the most efficient way and the myriad of emotions involved in
being at the verge of taking such a big step in life almost the whole
night passed by in no time. It was at 5.30am that I was finally able
to lie down. It wasn't really sleeping but more likely a very light
rest. It didn't take long for the alarm to ring at 8am. It was time
to take a shower and shave for the last time in who knows how many
days, have some coffee and take a few minutes of silence to look
around home and contemplate to give the heart a last look at that
small world I had built in the last few years of my life in China.
The time to leave had come once again, to leave not in the sense of
abandonment and forget but to leave carrying with oneself all those
things that one has gone through in life, the friends, the
experiences, the affection that one has harvested with time and love
throughout time. Leaving ain't about leaving behind but to keep going
with so much more inside, so much more. Some of the best friends that
have accompanied me almost from the very first days I was in town
were waiting for me downstairs. They gave me warm smiles for the road
and encouraging words for the trip I was about to embark on.

As I slowly started riding away from
home I couldn't help but looking back every few meters. I was filled
with great joy and excitement but I had a lump on my throat and the
tears were too hard to hold back between the eyelids. I started
riding along the very same roads that I had ridden dozens, if not
hundreds of times in the last 4 years, except that this time I knew I
wasn't coming back, at least that wasn't in my plans for any time
soon. It was Friday. November the 30th and Chengdu 成都was
grey as usual and already cold, about 8 C. I was heading south-east
along the mountainous road of Longquan 龙泉,
a road that I had ridden both alone and with friends more times that
I was able to remember. The road is the most common weekend getaway
for the locals who are into cycling.

I was all moved inside but my mind
was already set on the way out. It was hard for me not to push hard
on the pedals to speed up and get away from what was already
well-known to me. I was anxiously looking forward finding the new.
Three full days and almost 400km had to go by for me to start
entering unknown areas. Traveling around the country where one lives
in and knows quite well has its advantages, like being able to
communicate in the local language and dialect, knowing the local
customs, knowing where one is going to or not having any trouble in
asking anybody for help. On the other hand, it also has a big
drawback which is losing the ability to be surprised. It all seems
too easy and familiar. I have ridden and also traveled for work
thousands of miles within Sichuan四川so
it was hard for me to find something really unknown along the gray
and mostly industrial way from Chengdu 成都
to Luzhou泸州. It
was only a few miles after I left the city of Neijiang 内江that
I took a detour to a secondary road, as I usually do in order to
avoid high traffic, that I got to a particularly impressive place. A
village of people literally living in and off piles of junk. I rode
for about 10 km along this underworld where junk of all imaginable
kinds is brought from all over the city, using whatever transport
that can carry stuff. Trucks, rusty bicycles, motorbikes, or even
carts pulled by hand loaded until what's attainable without falling
off. Once in the village, every single piece of junk is manually
separated to later find its place within the same family of junk
where it belongs to. They are selected, folded, piled, packed and
finally stored to ultimately be taken probably to some recycling
plant somewhere. There is a whole industry around the junk and of the
richest women in China has made its fortune selling it. The road
along this village is flanked to both sides by countless piles of
junk, it is truly impressive. There are plastics, bottles, glasses,
televisions, toys, hair-dryers, tapes, door frames, windows, wheels
of all sizes, chairs, etc, you name it and it is there, every
imaginable thing. Every thing that comes from the trash we produce
and get rid off every day in our world of consumerism with no limits
find its place at the end of the line here. But maybe, the most
unreal type of junk that I ran into along this way was hair.
Protected behind his face mask and flanked by a huge pile of hair
brought all the way from the beauty parlors of Neijiang 内江,
Mr. Li, 49, spends mostly every day of his life sitting around
trillions of hairs that he skillfully and patiently separates and
groups into groups of colors and lengths.

Chinese growth is like this huge
mechanical system made of gears that need to work in perfect
synchronicity to move ahead, each gear doing its task to make the
growth happen without stopping. Likewise, people who fit into this
system are there to do their jobs and make it all happen. On the
other hand, people who doesn't fit try to scrape a living feeding off
its residues, almost like those fishes that travel along sucking off
the skin of a huge whale and feeding off it. The junk pickers are
those who stand at the end of the line of the absurd world of insane
consumerism where we live in, where everything manufactured is
deliberately designed to fail and break after a short period of time
to force us to keep consuming. In every city in China, from the
biggest to the smallest ones, there's this bubble going on where
people from the upper classes to people of the ever-growing middle
class consume as much as they can while leaving piles of trash behind
to others to deal with them.

Finally, after 4 days of cycling in
perpetually gray and cold weather, with lots of traffic along
polluted roads linking major cities where small hotels are the only
option for accomodation, I finally reached the long awaited detour to
the rural areas. The change is radical. The transition from
industrial China to rural China is abrupt and immediate. The road
turned narrow and had little to no signs at all. Villages became more
and more precarious and modest. I went from a world of modern
industries to a world of plowing where
peasants were sunk in the cold mud up their thighs and were helped by
oxes to LABRAR
the land. The signs of a harsh life start to show in the faces of
apathy of the peasants. In every stop I did, even though some people
smiled at me and would approach to me for a quick chat to satisfy
their curiosity, in general people stayed more or less indifferent
and their looks were cold and dim.

It is not only out
of the industries where massive production comes from. Along a series
of villages and already zig-zagging through the first rice terraces,
I found myself cycling past sidewalks
full of Kuaizi 筷子,
or what in the western world is known as “ chopsticks”.

There are workshops
inside each of the houses in these villages, where women of ages
ranging 30 to 60 sit all day long packing the chopsticks that will
find their place in the millions of restaurants and canteen spread
all over China. The chopstick is made out of the bamboo cane, a tree
that grows in abundance all along the south of China and is
well-known for its fast growth. Even though a bamboo tree needs about
7 years to root, once that part is done it grows at a pace of one
meter per day. The bamboo cane is a prodigy product of nature and in
its different species is used in a wide range of markets. It is used
to make the traditional sichuanese chairs and furniture in general,
it is used as the structure of the scaffoldings used to build
skyscrapers in cities like Hong Kong, it is used to build river
rafts, rows, decorative objects. It is widely used for garden design
and it is even an ingredient in some various types of local soups,
aside from being the main staple of the panda bears.

It was only half a
day earlier that I was riding in the 21st
century and now, except for a few signs here and there, I was riding
back in time in a pre-industrial era. Until today, around half of
China remains poor and rural and the contrasts with the China that is
currently developing to become a futuristic country are massive. This
was only the beginnig, since I would soon be leaving Sichuan 四川
to cross into Guizhou贵州province.

1 comment:

Hey Nico!How wonderful to start reading of your travels and to know you're obviously still alive and in one piece :)I'm looking forward to reading as much as you write - getting a small taste of your journeys into worlds I can barely begin to imagine.Wishing you all the very best and the most wonderful experiences!With warmth,Kim